bible:
we read through 1 Samuel 20 over the course of a few days, using lesson 80 from the calvary curriculum site. both gibson and emma did the coloring sheet, and emma did the fill-in-the blank sheet at the end of the week. in case anyone cares, we use the esv translation for reading the passages. the kids do quite well following along, though we do need to stop after about 10-20 verses and have emma (or sometimes it's me) narrate.
our memory verse for the week was from deuteronomy 31:6. now that gibson is in the same class as emma on sunday (sniff, sniff...my boy is getting big), we have been reciting it orally more often than usual. i like that, since it helps memorize the scripture too.
french:
we will be using this free site i came across to learn some basic french. i like that it's just audio, but it does show the words/phrases used on the screen. since emma can read already, she is able to see the word while hearing it being pronounced at the same time. we went through lesson 3 for the week, and then i tried using some of the words and phrases here and there through out the week.
language arts:
for copywork, we did 2 days of our memory verse and 1 day of the poem a thought by a.a. milne (it would have been 2 days, but the printer ran out of ink).
we went through lessons 40 and 41 in mcguffey and discussed some sight words, words that have "ight," "ould,"and how to add "ing" to words like "bike," "hike," etc.. i think i'll be skipping quite a bit ahead for the next few weeks and finish out this book. i'd like to move on the the second reader soon.
spelling words for the week were sent, went, melt, felt, and belt. emma did well spelling out the words so we only did 4 days of practice. i've been using each of the words in a sentence, and emma and gibson will occasionally join in and do their own versions.
science/nature study:
our mammal for the week was a squirrel. we didn't do anything too fancy-schmancy with our mammal. i printed out a simple fact sheet i made up on the computer (i'll have to post it in case anyone cares to use it too) so that she could record some basic information she gathered about squirrels. we also watched a couple of videos on squirrels. one was about the flying squirrel and the other was about a white squirrel (i can't find the one we watched for some reason).
i found a few pictures of squirrels on my phone to help emma draw a picture of one in her nature journal. she finally decided on one of a red squirrel. we also talked about the squirrels that we've seen in our backyard, and she came to the conclusion that those ones were more likely gray squirrels than the red variety.
math:
we did fred chapters 13 and 14 this week. i am drawing a blank at what we read through right now...i know there was adding two numbers to make 9 and discussion on orthogonal lines, but i can't remember what else! i do know that we didn't need to supplement on anything since emma did well with the lessons.
history:
we had a lot of history reading this week, but i finally managed to sort of catch up on the timeline. i finally got up to week 13 finished and all we have to do is cut and paste in emma's timeline/book of centuries.
we read the story of the coming of hengist and horsa from our island story. it tells about vortigern (who was now king of the britons) calling on the germans for help and the arrival of the saxons around 400 AD. i thought this story was a bit more challenging for emma to narrate. i think it may be due to the story itself. personally, it was not one of the more exciting stories we've read so even i didn't retain a whole lot of it either.
we read the black douglas from fifty famous stories retold. that one was a bit more exciting, and told the story of james douglas, a good friend of robert the bruce. narration was much easier for emma after this one, although i did break it up into 2 chunks to make it more digestible :).
last, we read about athanasius from trial and triumph. this one was a good story, but another challenging narration. i did have her do short narrations after a few paragraphs or so, but for some reason it was still challenging for her to narrate parts of it. maybe the interest level of this particular story was just not there (much like hengist and horsa)?
art study:
we did another week of Ruisdael's Two Watermills. I had planned on doing a painting project with an outlined drawing of his work, but alas the printer was out of black ink!
music appreciation:
this week we listened to part of Bach's Passion of St. Matthew. i like classical music, but DANG! this one's a long one. we listened to part one and it was an hour long! played it mostly during eating and play times, but because of the length i don't know that the kids heard all parts of part one. no matter though, we are planning to stay with this piece for the next 4 weeks so they'll be hearing it a lot.
in other music news, we went to guitar center and the kids had fun trying out the drums and pianos. emma tried to figure out how to play twinkle, twinkle little star after i showed her where middle c was.
geography:
no paddle this week, but we did use our new atlas to look at some of the locations from our history stories. afterward, emma went off and read through the book on her own and told me a few tidbits of information she gathered from her reading. i count that as a good week in geography!
literature:
we read the elephant child from just so stories. for some reason, the kids kept giggling every time the elephant got spanked, which was a lot. i had emma do a drawing of what she read for her narration. the girl likes to draw, but when she's not into it she does a rush job and sacrifices quality. oh well...i guess she prefers talking (that doesn't surprise me).
from the aesop for children we read a raven and a swan and the two goats. these were nice and short and narration went very well.
she had some free reading on friday (though she does read on her own everyday), and i had her narrate after she was done reading. she chose to read the sandman from our hans christian anderson fairy tale book. she read many other books through out the week - ones that she's read before. the ones that i noticed in particular were her magic tree house books. i think that girl has re-read those books at least 3-4 times since she got them last month.
we went out again on friday to do some bike riding (emma and gibson) and a stroll around the block. it was cold, but sunny so the time out wasn't so bad.
emma offered to wash the dishes for me everyday. isn't that sweet? except it lasted one day. haha. i've been trying to focus on keeping neat, organized rooms for the older two this week. they do pretty good at picking up after themselves downstairs (even cash is a champ at cleaning up...he's very detail oriented), but not as much when it comes to their rooms. ideally, i'd like to have them develop a habit of picking up and straightening up their rooms on a daily basis. not anything time consuming, just spending 5 minutes to straighten up in the morning and after nap/quiet time so that the mess doesn't pile up and get overwhelming (which is kind of where we are at right now).
gibson did a few copywork sheets again like last week. he's doing pretty good as long as he doesn't have to sit in one place for longer than 10 minutes. he is one active dude!
on one of the days, i found the oldest two busy working on dragon land. almost every sticker on the page had a background story to go with it. they had quite a time riding around the house on their broom horses. gibson, especially, was on a knight/warrior dude kick last week, and decked himself out with his shield, battle axe, helmet and his
i think that's about it for week 14.
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